Automating the crack map detection process for machine operated crack sealer

Automated crack-sealing machinery must accurately locate continuous individual crack segments so that they can be processed and treated effectively. In this paper, we illustrate the use of a geodesic minimal path based method for generating the crack map suitable for the path planning process. The user can detect continuous cracks that extend over several miles just by providing the starting point of a crack as an input to the algorithm. The algorithm can also detect transverse cracks by giving a single point on the crack. The continuous crack map generated can be utilized very efficiently to generate the optimal path for the crack sealer. An extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluation on real pavement images was done to show the usefulness of the algorithm. The algorithm is computationally fast and efficient.